


Sometimes He Wished

by tuesdaymidnight



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Broken Bucky Barnes, Canon-Typical Violence, Cunnilingus, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Former Soviets in Love, Hurt/Comfort, Marvel Universe, Memory Loss, Past Brainwashing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Science Bros, post-CATWS, sad Steve, winterwidow - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 01:40:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3100301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesdaymidnight/pseuds/tuesdaymidnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once out of HYDRA’s grasp, Bucky’s memories start to come back to him in a jumble, so he seeks out Steve for help. Once he’s safe in Avengers Tower, Bucky starts to interact with the ragtag team of superheros as they investigate a series of strange attacks on former SHIELD agents. With the help of Bruce and Tony, he starts to piece together more of his past, and he's surprised to remember that Steve isn’t the only Avenger he has a history with. Tucked among the dark past he struggles to reconcile are a series of uncommonly good memories with a certain former Russian operative.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sometimes He Wished

**Author's Note:**

> Though I make some references to the comics, I'm taking the MCU line here with Natasha—born in 1984—even though it doesn't fully make sense. I'm also not buying into the premise that you can replace memory content. Neuroscience isn't that advanced...you know, because the rest of this is so realistic. 
> 
> Thank you, thank you, thank you to [sapphirescribe](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphirescribe) for beta'ing this and for being an enabler of all things Marvel.

He let himself be caught. Whatever Steve thought he knew about where Bucky would go because of the strength of their enduring friendship, Bucky let him think it. Anyway, that was, in a sense, how he let Steve find him. He knew where Steve would be, so he put himself there.

But he could have kept running forever if he had wanted to.

Sometimes he wished he had.

* * * * *

When he finally decided to return to D.C., finding Steve was easier than finding the moon in a cloudless night sky. It was a week before he decided that he was finally going to let himself be seen. He lurked in the shadows, collected intel, and tried to remember everything he could about Steve Rogers. The longer he was out of cryo and the longer he was away from the torture and brainwashing, the more memories started to seep in—Brooklyn, his sisters, Steve before the serum, enlisting in the Army and feeling like he was important. The oldest memories came back first, and Bucky was grateful for that.

Even without specifics, he knew his newer memories, if he ever reclaimed them, were bad ones.

He figured out that Steve went for a run every morning. He wondered what it felt like the first time Steve got to breathe the air with strong lungs. He also wondered if the U.S. government paid him to run around their national monuments every morning like an endorsement. Of course, Captain America couldn’t just be normal and run on a treadmill—Steve probably did the same run rain, sleet, or snow—but that did make it easier for Bucky to interrupt him.

He waited for Steve to make his pass at the WWII memorial.

It was more poetic that way.

He wondered if his own name was in the database of those who served. He wondered now that his identity had been discovered if he would be stripped of his “posthumous” honors. He wondered if he’d be able to claim veterans benefits. Maybe he’d ask Steve. Even though he doubted Steve would find it very funny.

As Steve drew closer, Bucky casually shrugged out of his jacket and let his arm catch the morning sunlight. Steve skidded to a halt so fast he nearly toppled over from the momentum.

“Bucky?”

“Steve,” Bucky said.

Steve gaped at him. A flurry of emotions crossed his all-too-easy-to-read face. He settled eventually on cautiously optimistic, which made Bucky’s stomach clench. He would never be the man Steve remembered. He would never be his best friend. They would never marry nice girls and live next door to each other and raise their kids to be best friends with each other.

“You aren’t going to hurt me, Buck,” Steve said slowly.

Bucky didn’t know if he was asking or telling, but he responded as if Steve had asked.

“You’re not a mission,” Bucky replied. He left out the “anymore.”

“Okay,” Steve said. “Okay. So you know we took down HYDRA and most of your handlers.”

“I figured. You going to arrest me?”

“I’m not a cop.”

Bucky glared at him.

Steve continued, “As it turns out, I took down most of SHIELD, too.”

“Because of me?”

“Because of the lies.”

“So what now?”

“What do you want to happen?”

If he had the answer to that question, he wouldn’t have let himself get caught. He shrugged. He thought it was a stupid move on Steve’s part, trusting him so immediately, but If Steve wasn’t going to bring him into the custody of the authorities, then Bucky was at even more of a loss.

“My brain’s been scrambled. Can you help?”

“Maybe. I have to be honest with you. I’m not sure who to trust.”

Yet you trust me, Bucky thought. And I tried to kill you. What kind of world was he getting involved in where the hired assassin with over half a century of scrambled, partial memories was a person a guy like Steve Rogers could trust? He already knew the answer to that question, of course. He knew it all too well. He just didn’t like it.

Sometimes he wished Steve had just let the heavy scaffolding on the helicarrier kill him.

“Okay,” Bucky said slowly.

“I think I have a few friends left. Including a couple of wiseass geniuses who could probably take a look in your head.”

Bucky nodded, as if anything in Steve’s statement was normal, but inside he was panicking.

“I won’t be strapped down. They will tell me everything they’re doing. Everything. Even if I don’t understand it.”

He felt Steve’s hand on his arm. It was only then he realized he had gotten into a fighting stance.

“I’ll be with you the whole time, Buck.”

Bucky wished that was more comforting.

* * * * *

You couldn’t just erase specific memories, at least you couldn't in 1945. Whatever Zola thought he was doing, it wasn’t that. Even what SHIELD was doing was experimental and dangerous. When Alexander Pierce ordered him to be “wiped,” it wasn’t like a chalkboard that you could just swipe over with an eraser and remove the smell of acrid smoke or the taste of the blintzes he used to get from that little restaurant in Moscow or the sound of Count Basie.

Once the worst of the serums HYDRA had pumped into him had worn off and he was able to get his bearings, Bucky holed up in a cheap hotel room in New Jersey and watched every movie about memory loss he could find— _Memento_ , _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ , _The Bourne Identity_ , _Total Recall_ —and they were all wrong.

The human brain was resilient.

The human mind was a puzzle.

And no one had the solution to it.

* * * * *

There was a scientist in Czechoslovakia—Bucky knew it wasn’t called that now—he had ripped out the man’s throat with his metal hand. It was a sloppy kill.

He couldn't remember why he'd done such shoddy work. All his training told him to take the best, cleanest kill. But that scientist? Bucky had felt something when he killed that scientist. Rage. Anger. Things he wasn't supposed to feel.

He could remember what it felt like to have the scientist's neck under his hands, feeling that pulse of human vulnerability in his veins, and he remembered the moment it stopped pulsing and life ended.

He remembered getting a feeling of satisfaction from it. Or maybe the satisfaction was from the mess he left behind.

Sometimes he wished he had done the kill better.

* * * * *

He didn’t tell Steve anything at first.

At least, not about the vague memories he had over the 70 years that Steve had missed, not about where he had gone after he pulled Steve out of the water, and definitely not about how numb Bucky felt. He knew, rationally, that he should feel a sense of belonging, or at least relief, of recovering an identity that helped make sense of the sometimes random influx of memories he had over the last few decades, but he didn’t feel much of anything at all.

Sometimes he talked about Brooklyn, mostly just to get Steve going on a topic. Bucky wasn’t used to talking. It was a skill he hadn’t needed, so it was a skill he lost. His mouth dried too quickly anymore, like his vocal cords just couldn’t find the will to vibrate anymore.

It was probably payback. His mother used to call him her little chatterbox.

Steve would chatter on about anything and everything. He was still finding his way between 1945 and the 21st century. He was still scandalized by body piercings and miniskirts and Americans’ apathy toward anything that wasn’t on a TV show. Steve treated Bucky like they’d been through the same thing.

He didn’t treat Bucky like a killer.

Sometimes Bucky would tolerate it. Other times he would stand up and leave the room. He would see Steve’s face in the corner of his eye. He tried to care the way Steve’s eyes would go wide like he was losing Bucky all over again and the way he swallowed hard against that feeling, but sometimes he just...didn’t.

Frankly, he had enough guilt wracking through him.

* * * * *

It was always harder for him to kill women.

He was a weapon, a tool, but there was still some part of him that never got deleted that knew women weren’t usually to blame for the treachery of the wars fought by brash young men who thought they were invincible like he had been.

He still killed them, of course, that got easier as time went on, too. Women could be just as ruthless as men.

There was a madam in Bangkok. He took her to bed before he slit her throat.

He regretted that one sometimes. She had skin like porcelain and could shoot ping-pong balls out of her pussy.

* * * * *

It turned out that Avengers Tower was apparently the safest place for Steve to take Bucky. He didn’t know what that meant—presumably safe from HYDRA, maybe safe from SHIELD, but Bucky didn’t ask for details.

He was expecting to be a hostage, but he was led, not handcuffed.

They put him in living quarters.

Steve told him that he wasn't being monitored, but how could he believe that? Steve did ask him to cough up his weapons in a display of good faith, but Bucky held onto the two knives tucked into his boots. He waited until Steve left him alone long enough to use the bathroom to retrieve one from its hiding place in his sole and tucked it into his sleeve.

He didn’t know how long he’d be there, so he brought the rest of his possessions with him. He only had an green army duffel. It was little more than a few changes of clothes, a toothbrush, a few disposable phones that he was afraid would ring again, and a laptop that he used almost exclusively for watching movies.

Bucky let Steve take the phones, but when Steve saw the laptop he raised an eyebrow at Bucky.

“You can check it. It’s not HYDRA-issued.”

Steve blinked. “That wasn’t what I was thinking.”

“I know how to use technology, you know. You’re the fossil.”

He thought Steve might get mad, but all he did was shake his head and laugh. “You’re not the first one to call me a fossil.”

They used to let him travel without handlers, but that changed at some point. The memory of why wasn't one of the memories that had trickled back. Anyway, some of the handlers were nicer than others. One of them used to let Bucky watch movies on his computer. At first he only tried to scandalize Bucky with pornography, but when Bucky didn't react with much more than a shrug, he stopped and started recommending blockbusters.

Bucky pretended to like the action movies proffered him, but he actually preferred animated films.

Being frozen and unfrozen, having year-long gaps of time, in order to deal with the confusion, he would immediately cling to anything that felt familiar. Even brainwashed, there was something appealing about animated princesses and animals with their big dopey eyes and silly voices.

One the first memories that came back to him was taking his sisters to the cinema to see _Snow White_.

He remembered being backhanded by one of his handlers for whistling the dwarfs' work song.

* * * * *

Steve didn’t say it out loud, but it sure felt to Bucky like they were giving him some kind of adjustment period, probably to watch him. Steve insisted it was because Stark—Howard’s son, because of course Bucky would get caught up with the Starks—and Dr. Banner were on an assignment they couldn’t be taken away from.

But Bucky was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Steve insisted he could come and go as he pleased, and he was welcome anywhere in the living quarters. Part of the tower had been set up to house the so-called “Avengers,” even though Steve still spent most of his time in D.C. There was a full kitchen, a massive gym and training room with equipment Bucky didn't recognize, and a living area with a pool table and a TV so big that Bucky was pretty sure it wasn't available on the retail market.

Bucky couldn't sleep his first night there. He and his body still weren't used to normal human circadian rhythms. Hunger was a little easier to notice, but sleep had eluded him in the months since he went rogue. When Bucky went out into the common area in the middle of the night and there was someone there, he assumed it was a monitor.

A figure—Natasha, Steve had introduced her that afternoon—sat up quickly from her prone position on a sofa.

She was clearly Soviet-trained. He noticed it immediately. She didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him, but she seemed to be loyal to Steve, which was interesting. She and Sam were the only two people Steve had introduced him to that Steve seemed fully comfortable around. Though neither of them seemed particularly at ease around Bucky.

Frankly, he would have been more worried if they were.

He probably should have apologized for trying to kill them, but they would have rightly been taken for empty words.

Bucky's eyesight was so enhanced he could pretty much see in the dark, but when Natasha said “JARVIS, lights at 5%” the room filled with a soft glow that illuminated Natasha, making her skin look warm and the harshness of her defensive posture muted.

Natasha was without question the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” he blurted out. He widened his eyes. The words had slipped out without him thinking.

Natasha smirked at him.

“Is that what you think I am?”

Bucky gave her a hard stare.

“What if I just sleep better on sofas?”

“You weren't asleep,” he pointed out.

“Want a drink?” she said, unfolding herself from the sofa without waiting for him to answer. “Say what you will about Stark, his liquor cabinet is the place of dreams.”

“Stolichnaya,” Bucky said as he sat down onto the plush sofa. The ease with which the Russian word rolled off his tongue startled him.

“Lëd?” Natasha called from the bar.

“Nyet.”

“Khoroshiy chelovek,” he heard her mutter.

He tried to ignore the increase in his pulse at her approval.

She handed him a glass half full of clear liquid. He knew not to offer a toast, but he did wait until she came back with her own glass, along with the bottle, and sat down across from him on the sofa.

The taste was familiar to him. It wasn't his first glass of Stoli; he knew that much. They sat in silence. He watched her surreptitiously, wondering what she was thinking about.

“Do you remember shooting me?” she finally asked, breaking the silence. “Not in D.C., but before?”

His stomach dropped. He squinted at her for a minute, and then the memory came back. There was an engineer he had been sent to Odessa to kill. His team got the car over the cliff, but the occupants survived.

“I was shooting the engineer. You got in the way.”

Instead of the fear or anger he was expecting, she shrugged, and he would have sworn there was a ghost of a smile on her lips.

Heat started to pool in Bucky's groin. He drained the rest of his vodka.

“Thanks for the drink,” he said, setting the glass on the table and standing abruptly.

He didn't wait for her response before he swept out of the room, his heart racing too fast, his skin feeling too tight.

* * * * *

More memories started coming back to him, but he wasn't always sure if they were memories of things that actually happened to him.

Most of them were uncomfortable. Some of them were confusing.

He could clearly remember leveling six agents who were trying to get him back in his cryo chamber. He fought tooth and nail. A man was screaming in German at the other agents, “You left him out too long! You left him out too long!”

He remembered seeing The Beatles play in London once. It was around Christmas time, had to have been the early 60s. It couldn't have been a memory of seeing them on TV years later.

He knew he had been in Miami and Las Vegas. He remembered seeing showgirls, but he couldn't place the year.

But there were more gaps than memories.

* * * * *

Once Stark got back, it was like the whole tower had a different energy.

After Steve very warily introduced Bucky to Stark, he understood why.

Stark called him Robot Boy immediately. He knew Stark said it because of his arm, but it stung with the implications of being a robot—programmable, lacking autonomy, a puppet. Once he realized that he was offended, it actually felt kind of good. If he could still be hurt, then maybe he wasn’t totally hopeless.

Stark asked Steve to let him look at Bucky’s arm. Steve refused, as if he was in charge to do that.

“He just wants to know what they did to his mind. You’re not going to poke and prod him like he’s one of your toys.”

Bucky’s anger flared. He wouldn’t be Steve’s puppet or Stark’s.

The next day he took the private elevator down to the ground floor and stalked into the Stark Enterprise office. He went right past the front desk and right past security. There were five guards on him when he reached the elevator. They were all unconscious five minutes later. He hit the highest number button on the panel and waited.

The elevator wouldn’t move.

“You are not authorized for that floor,” the elevator said in a smug British accent.

“I can take off the top panel and climb up the shaft just as easily,” Bucky said into the air. “I’m not here to hurt anyone. I just want to see Stark on my own terms.”

The elevator started moving.

When it stopped, the doors opened up into an expansive office. Stark had his hands behind his back and was facing out the window yelling at someone, presumably through some kind of tiny electronic device Bucky couldn't see.

He didn't stop yelling when he turned to see Bucky.

“You can look at my arm,” Bucky said.

“I'll call you back,” Stark said. Then he touched something in his ear and advanced toward Bucky.

“We're going to have to go to my lab, well, one of my labs. Can you take it off? Or is it sewn on? Fused? Where was your arm amputated? Has it been upgraded or is this the original 1945 Nazi model?”

Bucky knew some of the answers to Stark's questions, but it seemed like he didn't really want answers. Bucky could sometimes hear Zola’s voice in his nightmares, the words “my finest creation,” haunted him. He knew the arm had been updated, enhanced, as technology had improved. He knew it had been demagnetized. And every time they made an upgrade, Zola was there, either in his body or on a screen. He was so proud of Bucky's arm. Of what Bucky did with the arm.

Bucky was pretty sure that sometimes he enjoyed hearing the praise.

Tony chattered incessantly as he tinkered with the arm. Bucky could tune it out for the most part. He was used to being poked and prodded, but then something Stark said dredged up another memory.

“...they’re this heavy metal band. You wouldn’t know anything about heavy metal....”

“I saw them play in Munich,” Bucky blurted out.

The tool Tony had been holding clattered to the floor.

“Say that again?”

“Before Bon Scott died. It must have been the 70s. They were in Europe.”

“Powerage Tour,” Stark said.

“I got woke up for a job and went to the show after.”

Tony was torn between wanting to talk about the concert and about how much Bucky remembered from his excursions out of cryo. Everyone was so quick to assume he’d had no autonomy. Even Stark had lumped him in with Steve as an anachronism, some super soldier with a metal arm from the 1940s who just didn’t exist for 70 years. They distinguished him from the ghost story he truly was.

He knew why Steve did. It was easier to see Bucky as programmed to do a job. It took fault and blame away from Bucky. It was sweet of him.

But he wasn’t a robot.

He was a killer.

* * * * *

The night after Stark examined his arm, after taking measurements and promising an upgrade, Bucky woke up in a cold sweat, panting with exertion.

There had been so much blood in his dream. So much blood that he thought he would never feel clean again. He knew he caused it. He nicked the femoral artery. It was a stupid slip, and amateur mistake, and he wondered if he would be punished for it.

But seeing all the blood made something in him snap. He kept slicing, making more of a mess until the body hardly resemble a human being any more. And the thing was, it felt good. There was something primal and satisfying in pulverizing the body.

It was only after a voice in his ear told him that he had done a good job that he snapped awake in a panic.

Steve was at his door in less than a minute.

Bucky had two knives out and one pressed up against Steve's jugular in less than five seconds.

“Bucky!” Steve said forcefully. “Buck, it's only me. You're okay.”

Bucky took a step back. As he tried to make his racing heart slow down, he couldn't recall if it was a memory or just a dream.

“The blood-” he choked out.

Steve put a hand on his shoulder. “There's no blood. It was just a dream.”

Bucky managed to calm down enough to raise an eyebrow at Steve. “No monitoring?”

“You were screaming, Buck. I could hear you from across the hall.”

“Sorry,” Bucky muttered.

“No, Buck, it's okay. It's—will you let me just-” he cut himself off and pulled Bucky into a hug.

Bucky tensed. It wasn't a fear response, it wasn't, but he couldn't remember being hugged in 70 years. He had forgotten what it was like to get affection. It felt so foreign to him. A hug, affection, it was something he hadn't earned, and certainly not from Steve. Bucky had been aloof and unsure since he let himself be found, rebuffing most of Steve's attempts to bond with him, to reclaim the friendship they once had.

Steve didn't seem deterred by Bucky's body language, though. Just like he hadn't been deterred by Bucky's stiffness and silence. When it became obvious that Steve wasn't going to give up, Bucky let himself relax a little.

It almost felt good.

* * * * *

The next day, Dr. Banner finally returned, and there was an Avengers meeting.

Bucky wasn’t strictly invited, but Steve knew he would eavesdrop anyway.

There seemed to be a silent conversation between them all when Bucky entered the room with Steve. Then Steve announced that he would vouch for him. Natasha did as well. Sam gave a half nod, which seemed to count as assent. When Stark chimed in too, he could almost sense the shock in the room.

“Robot Boy has good taste in music,” Stark said. “And he hasn't tried to kill anyone since he got here. He seems to have outgrown most of his homicidal tendencies with the whole remembering he was an American hero thing.”

Bucky wished that Stark was right about the latter part, but he wasn’t sure. He would never be sure.

Sometimes that bothered him.

Some SHIELD agent Bucky had never seen before, never one of his missions, started giving everyone the rundown. Everyone referred to him as Director, and every last one of them, even the alien—an honest to God alien—with the hammer, seemed in awe of him.

He just looked like a guy in a suit to Bucky.

From what Bucky could gather from the conversation, there was a super underground sector that was abducting former SHIELD agents and injecting them with some biological weapon that SHIELD couldn’t trace yet, and they couldn't tell who was behind it or how it was being funded.

They found out about it because apparently whatever was being injected didn’t always take, and the main side effect was death. But when it did take, the former SHIELD agents would violently turn on their former partners.

“We think they’re using some kind of nanotechnology to replace the cells in the body with a metal that's other-worldly. The injected substance works more like a living thing than a poison,” the man in the suit, Coulson, said. “They’re using some kind of nanotechnology to replace the cells in the body with a non-Earth metal, likely from the Keystone Quadrant. It’s nearly indestructible. This type of attack is more subtle than we’re used to. HYDRA never reached out to other systems before, so we’re unclear if they’re behind it. We're trying to run a trace on the sample we have, but it's small.”

“It is not of my people's world,” Hammer-guy said.

Coulson gave him a terse nod and then added, “From what we can tell it’s not direct mind control. It's more like A.I. The substance learns the body enough to take it over.”

Barton shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and Natasha sent him a look Bucky couldn’t decipher. Bucky probably should have reacted with discomfort, too, but mind-control was just a fact of life. The sky was blue. HYDRA had been inside his brain. There was nothing he could do to change either fact.

He only told Steve a partial truth. He did want his memories back, but he always wanted some way to know what was him and what was them—if there was any difference.

But what this man, Coulson, was saying sounded familiar, not because it was similar to what they did to Bucky, but because some of the words were familiar—the names of the quadrant, making human war machines. _Something_ was floating around in his jumbled memories, but it was one more thing he just couldn’t quite place.

* * * * *

Steve was right. They did let Bucky move around at will. For the most part.

Natasha was around a lot that first week. She had her own room, down the hall from Steve, but she was in the common area most of the time. Bucky thought it was probably so she could keep an eye on everyone else, but she respected them enough to do it openly.

He understood the instinct, that need to know. As a soldier, especially doing special ops, you needed to be hyperaware of your surroundings. As an assassin, you had to be aware of the person and the place. It was always more difficult to hit a mark when they had a lot of people around, so you had to learn the way they interacted with the people closest to them.

So he understood why she watched him, but she let him watch her back. And that he didn't understand. She seemed to like Bucky, or at least tolerate him, which left Bucky with such a mess of feelings he couldn’t unravel that he tried to avoid her.

One day he finally just asked.

“Why aren’t you trying to kill me?”

“Should I be?”

“I shot you. Twice.”

She shrugged. “These things happen in my line of work.”

“But that doesn’t absolve it.”

“I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of. I’ve pissed off a lot of people. I’ve played both sides. The best I can do anymore is pay my debts.”

“And I’m not one of those?”

“Rogers has saved my life more than once. At this point, I'm not sure I can pay him back.”

“So if it wasn’t for Steve?”

She shook her head. “I know what it’s like to have my mind taken away from me. It's not the same thing, but I’ve lost years of my life to other people messing in my head.”

She didn’t say anything else about it, but he had enough of an idea that he knew not to push.

His favorite place in the tower was the roof. A lot of his kills had been sniper work, so he had grown comfortable being tucked away in high places.

One day Bucky was sitting on the edge, looking down at the ground below until he was starting to get dizzy. He wondered if the building was smart enough to stop him if he just let go.

“This is my spot, man.” Barton said.

“Sorry,” Bucky said, backing toward the door.

“No, no, it's cool. Stay. Best view in the city.”

He didn't know what to make of Barton. He trusted him implicitly, but he didn't know why, and that bothered him. Maybe it was because Barton didn't seem interested in him one way or another.

“Nat likes you. That doesn’t mean she trusts you, but she likes you.”

Bucky didn’t know why Barton was telling him this. Was it obvious that he was attracted to Natasha, no, drawn to her? Was it obvious that he was simultaneously terrified of her?

He didn’t even understand his fear response. Maybe it was because she liked him that he found her scary. She was exactly the kind of woman who would fuck you and then stab you to death in your sleep.

He offered Barton that description of her, and he laughed so hard he almost fell off the roof.

“You know what? I think I might like you, too.”

* * * * *

Bucky took to Banner immediately. He’d never seen “The Hulk” but he could see the anger bubbling under Banner’s skin. The man was outwardly very calm, but there was a storm behind his eyes that Bucky could see, and somehow it made him feel less like a freak.

He wanted to know what the chances were of more of his memories coming back. He wanted to know what they did to him. He wanted to know if the memories he had were real. He wanted to know how he was brainwashed. He wanted to know if his dreams were really dreams.

He wanted to know if he would ever stop reaching for a knife whenever he heard a loud noise.

Those answers were why he went to Steve in the first place.

But at the same time he didn't want to know any of it. The truth wouldn't help him sleep or make the distant look in Steve's eyes go away. It was going to be ugly.

The reason he trusted Bruce was that he knew instinctively that Bruce would give it to him straight.

Bruce told him repeatedly he was a physicist and not a neurologist. But Bucky saw he could use Stark's equipment better than even Stark could. Or he seemed to have the patience to figure it out. Once Bucky had let Stark take a look at his arm, his brain damage was far less interesting, it seemed.

He let Banner give him a brain scan, nothing invasive. Bruce promised that so long as he could sit very still, there would be absolutely no need for restraints. Bucky was very good at sitting still.

“Believe me,” Banner said. “I feel the same way you do about being strapped down.”

Steve insisted on being in the room during the brain scan. Bucky knew Steve meant well, but he still didn’t know if Steve was worried about him or about what he might do if provoked.

“You don’t need to hold my hand, Stevie. I’m a big boy.”

Bucky could have sworn he heard Banner laugh.

“You scream in your sleep when your blankets feel too heavy. You might have triggers you don’t know about,” Steve said quietly.

“From what I know, Banner can take it if I snap.”

“I’m not worried about Bruce,” Steve snapped, looking pointedly at Bucky.

Steve’s expression felt like a punch in the gut. He knew it. He knew that look. It was the same look he’d give Steve when he had a bad asthma attack and insisted on staying outside in the cold.

“Fine. You can hold my hand.”

Steve crossed his arms over his chest and took a seat at Banner’s lab table.

“Are you two done bickering like an old married couple?”

“Run the scan, doc.”

It didn’t take long, and Bucky was grateful for it. Being forced to sit still made him think of long hours spent waiting for a target. The last time he’d done it was on the roof of Steve’s building in D.C. when Fury was his target. He fought back a laugh when he realized the lump in the pit of his stomach was guilt.

“Oh this is interesting,” Bruce murmured.

“What? What is it?” Steve said, hopping up to go look at Bruce's screen.

Bucky wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Well, once neurons die, they aren’t replaced. The human body replaces skin cell, blood cells, but losing neurons is like losing a limb. It won’t grow back. Uh, sorry.”

Yes, Bucky definitely liked Banner.

“Well, this was the 40s, right?” He kept going. “They knew less about the brain back then. They needed you to have all of your fine motor skills and spatial navigation and high-sensory functioning so you could use the arm and be trained in, well, whatever all your skills are. They just needed you to lose your identity and your autonomy—all that human stuff. But they couldn’t just damage your frontal cortex or hippocampus or lobotomize you without you losing some of the skills they needed you to have. So they rerouted your neural networks and altered your neurotransmitter balance. They upped your dopamine and lowered your seratonin. You’re balancing out now, but the levels are still pretty extreme.”

“How did they do all this?” Steve asked.

“Chemicals, electroshock, and good old-fashioned brain-washing. This is high-tech stuff today, let alone in 1945.”

“There were a lot of needles,” Bucky recollected. The shudder he gave was involuntary, human. He had been afraid of needles before he enlisted. They still made his stomach flip. He felt Steve squeeze his hand. Of course Steve would remember he was afraid of needles.

Bucky closed his eyes. The memories of his training were still fuzzy. There was a lot of praise, positive reinforcement when he did something they liked. He remembered Zola being particularly impressed, not by his strength, but by his ability to heal. When he thought back on it, his memories were mostly that of being treated like a pet.

He sat up abruptly and rushed to the wastebasket in the corner of the room. He didn’t have much of anything in his stomach, so he ended up dry-heaving for a few minutes. When he finally stopped and felt like he could tamp the memory down, he cast a glance over his shoulder. Steve was halfway toward him, frozen in place, like he knew that the last thing Bucky wanted was for him to hold back his hair. Bruce was just looking at the scan results.

Bucky stood up and went back to the exam chair, perching casually on it this time.

Bruce continued like nothing had happened. “They were probably pumping you full of experimental serums and injections right into your brain tissue. There’s some scarring at the front here.”

“So what’s the prognosis?” Steve said.

“You’ve started getting memories back?”

Bucky appreciated that Banner ignored Steve’s question and addressed him directly. Bucky nodded.

“Well--”

Bruce was cut off by Natasha bursting into the room.

“You’re needed, Rogers,” she barked at him. She was in full-on agent mode. Bucky had never seen her on duty, so to speak. There was always a little bit of tension around her, but Bucky could sense now just how deadly she was.

She spared him a glance, softening ever-so slightly, and she tilted her head at him.

“Bruce find out what’s wrong with you?” she asked.

She didn’t wait for him to answer before turning on her heel and stalking out of the room. Steve shot him an apologetic glance.

“Duty calls,” he said.

“I’m fine,” Bucky said. He could sense Steve still standing there, so he forced himself to look up and meet his eye. He didn’t know what Steve saw when he looked at him, which is why he usually avoided it, but he met his eyes and tried to smile. “Really,” he added softly. “I will be.”

Steve nodded.

After Steve left, Banner started to put away all the scanning equipment.

“I’d like to do another scan maybe in a week, just to see how the brain chemistry is changing. If that’s okay?”

“You've had this done to you, haven’t you?”

Banner sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’ve had all the tests. I’ve had all the needles and blood work and brain scans and bone scans. There's an explanation for it, but there's no solution to it. I just have to live with it.”

“When you're the other guy, do you remember?”

“I didn’t used to. Did you remember when they took you out of the freezer?”

Bucky didn’t answer, which was kind of an answer in itself. Instead he asked, “Was it better when you didn’t remember?”

“There was a lot less guilt.”

“The worst thing was knowing that there was something to remember but not being able to remember it. They usually didn’t keep me out long enough to where I could remember,” Buck blurted out.

“Denial is harder now that everyone has a video camera on them and you end up on Youtube.”

“Now I remember the people I killed. I'm not sure I want those memories back.”

* * * * *

There was a dictator that HYDRA wanted to keep alive in some Middle Eastern country he didn't remember the name of. He remembered the desert, though. He remembered looking out into the sand and thinking that it looked like eternity. He remembered the sun making his metal arm uncomfortably hot. Bucky’s mission was to take out the Americans sent to kill the dictator.

But the clearest of the memories was Alexander Pierce smiling at him before shoving him back into the cryo tube once the Americans were dead.

“The work you have done for the world has been remarkable,” he would say.

He wouldn’t have said that if he didn’t think there was still a human inside. He wouldn’t have said that if he didn’t think Bucky wanted to be valued. Bucky was never _just_ a weapon. He was never just brainwashed. There was a part of him that wanted to follow his orders. Maybe a part of him that wanted to kill.

He liked Pierce's praise. He knew that part wasn't a dream.

Bucky woke up and ran to the bathroom. He hunched over the toilet and vomited until there was nothing left in his stomach.

Steve found him in the bathtub with no water running and a knife in his hand. He called to him loudly before entering the bathroom. Probably to save himself from being held at knife-point again. Bucky wondered absently why Steve hadn’t taken his knife after the first incident.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“I'm all right.”

“Yeah, you look all right. You know, usually these things work with water in them.”

Steve climbed into the tub and sat down next to Bucky. He didn't touch him, and Bucky couldn't decide if he was grateful for that or not. He felt vulnerable. He didn't do scared well; he didn't do scared at all. He couldn't be sure he wouldn't lash out, try to fight Steve off if he laid a hand on him.

He did notice that Steve was breathing slowly, four counts on the inhale and four counts on the exhale. Bucky tried to match the steady pattern, feeling his heart coming back down from its racing pace. Steve didn't say anything, just sat there and stared straight ahead calmly.

“We used to take baths together when we were kids, didn't we?” Bucky asked finally.

“You know, I'm not sure,” Steve said. “We probably had to to save water.”

Bucky looked down at his knees. His childhood had been a happy one—he remembered that much. But the man sitting beside him seemed so different from the boy he remembered. He could tell that Steve's optimism had been clouded by the 21st century. There was something heavy lurking under Steve's skin that had never been there before that Bucky could remember.

“Do you want to know what I dream about?” Bucky finally asked, looking over at Steve.

The corner Steve's mouth twitched before he answered matter-of-factly, “Showing up to school naked and having Maryann Baxter point and laugh?”

Bucky choked out a strangled bark of laughter.

Sometimes Steve knew exactly what to say.

* * * * *

“You killed Pierce, right?” Bucky asked Steve later that day.

Steve and Sam were hunched over a table with files spread open across it. Steve still preferred to work with paper and pencil than with Stark’s fancy tablets and digital images floating around his head. And Sam humored Steve.

“Fury did. Shot him twice,” Steve said. “Natasha was there.”

“Good,” Bucky said.

He stood helplessly in front of the table, trying to sort out why he felt such a mix of feelings when the only thing he should have felt was satisfaction and relief.

“Hey, do you want to see what we're looking at?” Sam asked, which startled Bucky. “These guys worked with Pierce.”

“Do you think that's a good idea?” Bucky asked, edging closer toward the table. The truth was, he was curious. If these people had anything to do with what happened to him, then he was more than happy to help take them down. “Did Steve mention he found me puking in the shower this morning?”

“No, he didn't,” Sam said, and Bucky believed him. “But post-traumatic stress is a real thing and it's scary. You're going to have some triggers.”

So Bucky sat down at the table and Steve passed a file over.

“Are these all HYDRA agents?”

“Suspected ones,” Sam said. “They're all still unaccounted for.”

Bucky looked through the files.

“Him. He was there.”

“He was where?”

“I don't--” Bucky squinted. “I don't remember. I don't know. But I know him.”

“It's okay, Buck.” Steve reached his hand out and gave Bucky's wrist a squeeze. “If you remember, you remember. If you don't, you don't. It's okay.”

Bucky nodded absently.

It didn't feel okay. 

Sam offered to take him to the local VA chapter that afternoon, but Bucky couldn’t. It wasn’t the same. He had been a soldier, yes. He was an amputee and technically a POW, but it still wasn’t the same. They couldn’t understand him anymore than he could understand nerve gas in the jungles of Vietnam.

He had been to Vietnam once, in the 80s, but that was one memory he hadn’t felt the need to keep.

“If you ever reconsider. Let me know. If not for yourself, you might be surprised at the good you could do.”

Bucky opened his mouth to object, but Sam kept going.

“I told Steve you weren't the kind you save, that you're the kind you stop. I was wrong about that.”

Bucky wasn’t so sure. He knew Sam was giving him an opening. He knew that some of the vets Sam spoke to probably killed civilians. He knew that they probably struggled with reconciling that to who they were on re-entry to the civilian world.

But he wasn’t a soldier. He was a living, breathing weapon. He signed up with the Army to kill Nazis. He didn’t sign up to be their right hand. How did he come back from that? How could anyone come back from that?

“I’m never going to be the same person. Can you—can you tell Steve that?”

“He knows.”

“But-”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t still be a person.”

Sam hit the nail on the head.

“And it doesn’t mean you can’t still be friends. You know being thawed wasn’t easy on him.”

Sam was right, but Bucky didn’t need to feel worse.

* * * * *

He felt most comfortable around Banner. It was either the fact that everyone else walked on eggshells around both of them or that Banner didn’t pity him, but he found himself in Bruce’s lab a lot.

At first it was because Banner was studying him.

But then it was because Banner didn’t push.

Banner was trying to do research on this weapon HYDRA had gotten its hands on, research Bucky didn't understand. One day Coulson came into the lab and suggested they could contact someone named Loki for help, and it was the closest to losing it Bucky had seen Banner.

“We have one other option.”

“Not him.”

“You just don’t like him because he has better toys.”

“He had better toys. I heard his store-house got blown up.”

Banner looked up at Bucky and offered the explanation that Coulson didn’t give, “Guy called 'The Collector' we know on another planet who was way too curious about the other guy.”

Banner didn’t seem to mind talking to him about “the other guy.” Bucky was pretty sure that he didn’t talk to anyone else about it, but maybe after poking around in Bucky’s brain he realized that the guy you trust is the one just as fucked up as you. Bucky could tell that Banner had struggled with it a lot, but he was so matter-of-fact about it, Bucky let himself feel a tiny bit of hope that he could accept himself as The Winter Soldier.

They traded “woke up in strange places” stories.

“In the middle of the Yukon territory under a pile of uprooted spruce trees right by a grizzly bear den.”

“In a Soviet spy training compound in the middle of Siberia. Shoveling the walks between the buildings was a _reward_ for good behavior.”

“Naked in a pile of rubble under the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“In the 1980s.”

“You win.”

One afternoon Stark walked in on them in the middle of one of these conversations and chimed in, “I once woke up in the middle of a whorehouse in Saigon. I had to take a lot of antibiotics after that trip.”

Bruce and Bucky both stared at Stark.

“What? Listen, Robot Boy, I need to do a little bit of poking in your central nervous system.”

“Um,” Bucky started.

That was the only opening Stark needed.

“There’s something we can try that will remove some of the scar tissue. Should open up your neural pathways. We can also give the arm an upgrade while we’re in there. Give you even better fine motor sensing. It’ll be just as sensitive as human skin but without the pain receptors. You'll be able to pet bunnies and feel up gals. Or guys. Whatever you’re into. I’m not here to judge. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who have a robot kink. Hell, Pepper would probably tell you I have a robot kink.”

Bucky shook his head. “You mean brain surgery?”

“Well, I wouldn’t do it. I’m just the mechanic. But I have a guy who can.”

“You have a brain surgeon?” Banner interjected.

“More or less.”

“Is the scarring slowing my memory recollection?” Bucky asked.

“What do you mean by 'more or less'?” Bruce asked at the same time. It was the smarter question, but at this point, Bucky was pretty sure that none of these people in the tower, none of these Avengers, wanted to kill him. He was pretty sure they were just about the most fucked-up group of superheroes you could put together.

Maybe you had to be a little fucked up to be a superhero.

Anyway, Bucky wanted his timelines back if he could get them.

“You mean you have a robot that can do brain surgery,” Bruce hedged.

“With more accuracy than the human hand. No shakes, no slips. It’s better than whatever machine SHIELD used to fuck with Agent.”

“You mean Coulson.”

“Let’s do it,” Bucky said, interrupting their banter.

“What? I didn’t think you’d be so agreeable. I was going to get the Captain to put on a song and a dance routine in his spangly uniform.”

“You say it's better than a human surgeon?”

“Is your arm better than a human arm?”

Bucky didn’t answer. But it was better than a human arm. He hated thinking about the Nazis improving him.

They should have just let him die.

* * * * *

Bucky tried with Steve. Sometimes.

The disappointed look on Steve's face was starting to bother him. And it was starting to bother him that it bothered him.

When he blurted that out while lying on the exam table during their next brain scan, Banner said, “So you might be a real boy after all.”

“Very funny.”

It was just easier to be around Banner than Steve. If Banner was worried about what was going on with the possible new weapon and the SHIELD agent abductions, he didn't show that to Bucky. He told Bucky about what was happening in his brain, and then Bucky would ask him questions to keep him talking. He was trying to figure Bruce out, trying to figure out what part of him was also the hulking monster Bucky had still never seen. He couldn't quite reconcile the two.

That was probably the real reason why he liked Bruce so much.

“You think the surgery is a good idea?” he asked.

Bruce shifted uncomfortably. “Are you talking to anyone else about this?”

Bucky ignored the question. “Would you do it?”

Bruce stared at him for a long time, one of those hard, piercing stares.

“Yeah, yeah I would. I'd do anything if it meant the possibility that I could have my brain intact.”

That was why Bucky didn't ask anyone else—Bruce got it.

* * * * *

Bruce didn't pity Bucky. Natasha didn’t pity him either.

But then, she never saw him wake up screaming that first week as his memories started to fill in far faster after the surgery. He was pretty sure that Steve had seen his own fair share of shit even with the 70 year gap, but Steve still pitied him—as much as he tried not to show it.

Bucky wondered if Steve would pity him more or less if he knew what kind of memories were coming back.

Even his dreams started feeling more like memories taking shape. When one memory in particular came to him, in the fuzzy hours of the early morning when everything was quiet, he sat fully upright in bed and started laughing. It was a good memory. The only memory that didn’t come accompanied with a pang of what was lost. It was real. He knew it was real.

“Why do you call her Tasha?” he asked Steve that morning. “Her name's Natalia.”

“You knew that?” Steve questioned.

“So you know her real name, too?” Bucky asked back.

“Natasha was the alias she had when she came to SHIELD. How did you—she said you shot her once, near Kiev.” Steve was trying to put it together. Steve didn’t realize that Bucky wasn’t given names unless it was absolutely necessary. He wasn’t a spy. He couldn’t do undercover work very easily with a metal arm. He killed. The identities of his targets didn’t matter, who they were, what they did, if they had a family, their aliases.

He knew Natalia from before Kiev. He was almost certain he had known her when she was a child. He was starting to get back memories of when he had gone from the Nazis' hold to the Russians'. The Russians had been less stringent about putting him back in the cryotube. He remembered a room full of girls who were in training.

He remembered a little red-haired girl who liked to talk back to the instructors. A little girl who was the best in her training group by far and she knew it.

But they had met again as adults. He didn't tell Steve the specifics. She had been working for the KGB's side at the time, and the details he had remembered earlier that morning probably would have made Steve blush.

He wondered if she still liked having her hair pulled.

If she remembered him from those months in Moscow, she didn’t betray that to him. He wondered if anyone could be that good at masking themselves. There were very few things he knew to be true, but one of them was that she hadn’t been playing him back then. She had been Natalia.

So if she didn't remember him, then maybe she _did_ know what it was like to have her mind altered.

He pretended he didn’t desperately want her to remember or to acknowledge that once upon a time they were, well, something, whatever two people in an impossible situation could be under the tight control of the KGB.

Wanting was a dangerous thing. Wanting things only led to pain when you didn’t get them.

He saw that pain on Steve's face every time he tried to make a joke that Bucky didn't get or share a memory from their time with the Howling Commandos that Bucky didn't remember.

Sometimes he wished Steve would stop trying.

But that was like wishing Steve wasn't Steve.

* * * * *

Natalia was the only one of the so-called Avengers who would spar with him.

It started one morning in the early hours when they were both awake in an otherwise quiet tower. Fighting with her made him feel close to her, made him feel in tune with her on a primal level. He wasn't sure what she got out of it.

He knew what she was capable of, maybe even more than she knew herself.

One afternoon, the whole team was in the tower. They were all getting restless; Bucky could see it. Soldiers antsy before battle, waiting on information that they had to get from a different galaxy—a different galaxy, Bucky had trouble reconciling that. They were all in the main living area of the tower, not because there was a meeting that Bucky knew of, but because they just seemed to gravitate there.

He cleared his throat and stood up.

“A house full of superheroes and this tiny woman is the only one with the stones to go up against The Winter Soldier,” Bucky taunted, shooting Natalia a wink in the hopes she wouldn’t take offense.

“Training room. Now,” she said.

He tried not to smile as he followed her out of the room.

Once they got started, the training room started to fill with gawkers. Stark started cheering on Natalia, which made Steve start shouting encouragement at Bucky. Barton taunted Nat, which was his way of egging her on. Sam just watched with bemusement, wincing audibly at the worst of the hits.

He offered her a truce when he could see her stamina starting to fade. Even without serum, she could go toe to toe with him, but she would never be able to level the playing field in an endurance race.

“I offer a draw with the utmost respect,” he said in Russian. “I could go all night without tiring.”

That was when she slipped and gave him an opening.

It was only after he was offering out his hand to her to pull her up that he realized exactly what he had said, but more importantly, how she took it.

“What did you do wrong?” he asked the question Alexei always asked in the Red Room.

“I let you use my own weapon against me.”

If they weren’t standing in a room full of men, he would have gone for broke and tried to kiss her right then and there, but he figured Stark knew Russian and was hanging on their every word, so he chose his words carefully.

“I should probably concede the victory then,” he said.

She tilted her head.

“Now that I know being vulnerable to your weapon is an option for me.”

Her wry smile was back.

He loved that smile.

* * * * *

She didn’t come back for one week, six days, and seven hours.

He didn’t like it.

* * * * *

The more memories he got back, the worse his nightmares got.

Sometimes Natalia was in them. Sometimes he killed her, sometimes he pulled her from the car instead of Sitwell, sometimes he shot at her instead of through her.

He tried not to sleep.

He spent a lot of time on the roof, staring out over the city.

The memories didn't stop. He remembered a conversation he had with Natalia about leaving, about evading his handlers to make an escape. He knew it wasn’t a dream. There had always been this level of understanding between them—it might have been due to their similar training or feeling like the odd one out or maybe from not knowing who you were but having one thing to cling to that felt real.

Sometimes he wished he didn't miss her so much it hurt.

The rest of the time he eavesdropped or bullied Steve into telling him what was going on. Because he wasn't an idiot, he knew it was something big, dangerous, and he still felt an unmistakable bit of protectiveness over Steve.

It was like a douse of cold water over his head when he realized it.

One morning when Steve got back from his daily epic run around Central Park where he got stopped so often that there was actually a twitter hashtag for it, Bucky was waiting for him with breakfast.

“You made pancakes?”

“I know how to cook.”

Steve took a tentative first bite and groaned happily at the taste.

“These taste just like Nana Barnes'.”

“That's one memory I'm glad I got back,” Bucky muttered.

Bucky probably could have just asked Steve for information outright, but when it happened over breakfast, it felt less like an interrogation and more like a conversation.

As much as Bucky could gather around mouthfuls of pancakes, Steve and company didn't really know what was going on, and that was why everyone seemed so terrified.

To Bucky, it seemed like they were all stuck on trying to figure out if the threat was HYDRA or not, which was a stupid logistical argument.

Barton and Coulson and Steve were arguing one evening with Stark about some kind of hair-brained plan of Stark's to do fly-by intel missions on every known HYDRA hideout in the world when Bucky finally blurted out that they were being stupid. All four men turned and stared at him.

“Look. Are these people you're going after doing something you don't like?”

“Obviously they are, Buck. What are you getting at?”

“Then they're the enemy. Period. Why does it matter what organization they work for?” Bucky shrugged.

“Spoken like a true assassin,” Stark said. “Glad to see you still have it in you. Was afraid you were just pretending to be this ghost killer.”

“If we know their connections then it's easier to get intel,” Coulson started to explain.

“Figuring out their endgame is how you get the intel you actually need,” Bucky said. “People change their behavior when they know they're being followed, but they never change their goal.”

“He has a good point,” Barton said.

Coulson didn't say anything.

* * * * *

Bucky knew exactly when Natalia returned, because he'd made a deal with JARVIS to tell him immediately when she got back. That's how he knew that she didn't stop to talk to anyone.

Instead, she came straight into his room and kissed him.

He kissed her back. He brought his metal arm around her waist and pulled her closer. Her lips were just as soft and full as they looked. She seemed to kiss with her whole body, and Bucky could feel something inside of him start to break.

“Why now?”

“I spent the the last two weeks in a five-star hotel in Costa Rica, and the whole time I couldn’t help thinking it would be a lot better if you were there with me.”

Maybe that was enough.

He kissed her again, this time slower with all of the promises he could never say out loud to her. She backed him up to the bed and pushed him down so she could straddle his lap. There was sex to scratch the itch, to get that need met, to feel the release. And there was sex that meant something. He wanted her to know that if they did this, that it was going to mean something to Bucky. He wasn’t going to be a notch on her belt.

She pressed in closer, first pushing him onto his back and then rolling them over and pulling him down on top of her. The amount of trust in the move made him feel like he was breaking into a thousand tiny pieces.

“Natalia,” he whispered reverently.

He felt tears stinging his eyes.

He had to pull away and bury his face in the crook of her neck. The scent she wore when she wasn’t on a mission, dabbed at the pulse point behind her ear, it made a flood of memories come back.

One time he remembered her even after he came out of cryo. He had tried to go back to her, but they stopped him. The next round of injections probably caused the scarring Bruce had found in his brain.

She combed through his hair.

“I kissed Steve once.”

“Oh?” He lifted his head.

“We were being chased by HYDRA agents, it was a diversion,” she said, the tone of her voice scolding him for being jealous.

He relaxed a little. If it came down to it, he thought he would fight Steve for her. He didn't know what to make of that.

“I asked him if it was his first kiss since 1945. He insisted it wasn't.”

Bucky laughed. It felt strange to laugh, but he determined quickly that he liked it. He liked it enough to think that maybe if he kept doing more of it, he might feel like a person again.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You have definitely been kissed since 1945.”

“My life's been short the last 70 years, but it's been a life. I kissed you,” he added.

She froze.

“You mean before,” she whispered.

He nodded. “It's not fully clear for me yet, but I, we did. We kissed.”

“If I know me, then we did more than kiss.”

“Yes,” he murmured against her lips. “We did a lot more than kiss.”

She pulled away a little and looked at him. She brought her hands up to cradle his face and looked into his eyes. Whatever she was looking for in them, she seemed to find it.

“I know what it's like, you know, to have them mess with your memories.”

“So do you remember-” his voice broke. “Do you remember me?”

She didn't answer for a long time. Bucky waited.

“I wasn't sure at first. I only have bits and pieces. I was fucked with so much I don't know what's real and what isn't anymore. One of their 'training' techniques was an isolation chamber. Your mind starts playing tricks on you.”

Bucky nodded. He knew.

“I remember the feeling of metal against the small of my back. I was young then, 19, 20, for all intents and purposes a child, but I remember—I remember you treating me like an equal, like I mattered. You—you understood. You knew what I had gone through. You knew what I was and you wanted me anyway.”

“I did—Natalia, I did.”

“I thought I lo—well, but then they put you back on ice, and they scrambled up my brain.”

“I tried to get to Budapest,” he whispered to her.

“Budapest? It all went to hell in Budapest,” she said. “Was that-? Oh. Well, it’s okay now. You’re here now and you’re whole.”

“But I'm not whole,” he whispered. “Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

She exhaled hard and pressed herself against him. He held her against his chest, feeling his shirt get damp with her tears.

“I remember everything, Natalia...and you were the one good thing in all of it,” he murmured into her hair.

“What did I call you then?” Her voice was steady again.

“They never gave me a name. You called me 'Soldat'.”

She lifted her head. She didn't give him the pitying look. Instead, she seemed to study his face.

“I can't call you Bucky.”

“Call me James.”

“James,” she repeated. “Yes, that'll do.”

It was pouring down rain when they made love. It wasn't just sex for Bucky even if he couldn't say it.

He put his tongue against her, lapped at her clit teasingly until her thighs started to squeeze his head. He laughed and she cuffed his head gently.

“Are you going to finish what you start?”

“Mmm...thinking about it,” he said.

He went back to it, circling his tongue as he pushed two fingers, not the metal ones, inside her. She was slick and warm, and he could remember—she tasted the same. When he sped up, her thighs started to tremble, and she squeezed around his head again, this time as a reflex.

“James,” she gasped as she came.

He pulled his fingers out slowly and then pushed them back inside her gently as he sat back on his heels. Her red hair was a messy nest on his pillow, her cheeks were flushed, and she was smiling up at him. It was her real smile. A genuine smile. Not the one she used to flirt with or to smirk with or to put up a front with.

She sighed contentedly and then looked up at him with hooded eyes. Taking the cue, he crawled up her body and pushed inside her.

He wasn't sure if they had ever done this before—face to face, slowly, with time to appreciate the way the other reacted, learning the way the other liked to be touched and where.

She kissed him. He wasn't sure if she would, but she didn't seem to mind the taste of herself on his lips. She wrapped her legs around him, using her strength to urge his speed faster, then slower and deeper.

When she came a second time, there were tears in her eyes.

He had to bury his face in her neck because she was too much. She was too beautiful. When he came he muffled his own cry in her shoulder. He would have said too much otherwise. He would have offered her everything and made promises that he wasn't sure he would ever be able to keep.

So he let her skin absorb his wishes.

They stayed like that, him softening inside her, for a long time as they listened to the rain.

* * * * *

Two days later, the whole crew was waiting for Coulson to arrive with information. The tension in the room was starting to make Bucky’s skin feel too tight.

“If HYDRA had this nano stuff in the '40s, I might have been a Stalinbot instead of his robotic arm.”

“James,” Natalia scolded.

Every single person in the room stopped what they were doing and turned to look at her. Except Barton. He figured she would tell Barton, though, he wasn't sure Barton was the type to react anyway.

“Well that's one way to tell everyone,” Barton muttered.

“When did the two of you start fucking?” Stark demanded. Bucky could see him about to ask Natalia if she had a robot kink before thinking better of it.

Steve made a choking noise. “You're doing, well, what he said?”

“2003, give or take, my memory's a little fuzzy,” Buck said drily.

He heard Banner snickering in the corner.

“How is that-?”

“We have a history,” Natalia said with a shrug, not looking at Bucky, knowing what that might betray.

“Well, better you than me, Barnes,” Stark said, coming over to clap Bucky on the shoulder. “Your girlfriend is terrifying.”

Bucky looked down at his lap and smiled. When he glanced up, Banner was smiling back at him. Sam had a look on his face like he knew all along. Barton was whittling something and not paying attention to any of them. Thor was beaming at Natalia fondly.

Steve was still looking back and forth between the two of them like he was watching a game of ping-pong.

“Rogers if you keep doing that, I'm going to stab you in the neck,” Nat threatened.

“You know, you're exactly his type,” Steve finally said.

Bucky was about to crack a smile. Luckily Coulson showed up.

Bucky had been slow to realize it, but he understood the reverence that the rest of them had for Coulson. Bucky disagreed with his information gathering approach, but Coulson had started giving out additional orders after that conversation. He wasn't power hungry or vindictive. He really did seem to want to protect people. But mostly, he was pretty sure that Coulson was the smartest out of any of them, much to Stark's chagrin.

He saw Coulson make note of Natalia's hand where it rested on Bucky's thigh, but he didn't react to at all. Just made a mental note and started talking.

“We've been able to determine they aren't after money. They've had ample opportunity and haven't taken any more than they need for equipment. This is about power and control, ultimately, we think they intend to use the ‘enhanced’ agents to strongarm governments both here on Earth and intergalactically.”

So he had listened to Bucky about looking into end game.

“We believe it's a small sector of HYDRA that apparently not everyone in HYDRA knew about. There was a faction who didn't agree with inter-space dealings and didn't trust alien technology, so this group broke off and began independent research, hence the discretion. For better or worse, what happened in New York caused some fissions in the organization.”

Coulson kept talking about lab locations, but he passed around more files of known accomplices. Bucky snatched the paperwork out of Coulson’s hand before he could give it to Steve. Steve wouldn’t have been any help anyway.

When Bucky looked at the faces, at least two looking back at him seemed familiar, but he couldn’t quite place them. Whoever they were, he didn’t think he had ever traveled with them or worked with them.

But he couldn’t be sure.

* * * * *

They raided one of the laboratories Coulson’s people had been able to locate. It was the only one in North America—Canada—and it was only accessible by helicopter and half a day’s hike.

Bucky wasn’t allowed to go. They didn’t tell him that explicitly, but he knew.

Nat, Steve, and Clint were gone a full three days. Bucky didn’t sleep a wink during that time, so when the group finally returned, he was on edge.

They let him in the room for the debrief. There was no way they could have kept him out anyway. He refrained from plastering himself against Nat’s side, but he did give her a visual once-over. There wasn’t a scratch on her. He knew there wouldn’t be, but he wanted to see for himself.

Apparently the lab had been empty when they got there. The intel they had received was just a little too late, which meant there were either even fewer people they could trust or their communications were being intercepted.

But they had been close. The lab was full of equipment, expensive equipment. The communications system was set up to make contact outside of Earth orbit, and they must have left in a rush to leave behind such valuable tools.

To Bucky that meant they were dealing with scientists and not governments. Governments had muscle. Muscle would have been waiting for an attack.

Natalia managed to get some data off one of the computers they had left behind. It was encrypted, but Stark insisted that he and Banner could unravel it. He snatched the drive out of Nat’s hand and left the room with Bruce on his heels.

There was something sinister about the whole thing, like it was a prelude to something worse. The faction knew the Avengers were after them, but they weren’t up for a fight.

Bucky was missing something, failing to put something together.

He didn’t do well at feeling helpless.

* * * * *

After the debriefing, Bucky managed to get Nat alone in his quarters.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Did you sleep at all while I was gone?”

He shook his head.

“You shouldn't worry about me,” she scoffed. She sounded insulted. Bucky understood.

“I wasn’t worried about you, okay, maybe I was a little. But you can handle yourself. You’ve always been able to handle yourself. Even you were pretending for me that you weren’t scared. I know you’ll fight with everything in you.”

“So what is it?”

“There’s that chance, that risk. No matter how good you are, you aren’t bulletproof, and I can’t lose you. I can’t—Nat, I’ve lost everything over and over and over and I-” his voice cracked and he went over to sit on the bed.

She stepped up to him and let him lean forward, pressing his face against her abdomen while she carded her fingers through his hair while he caught his breath. There weren’t many tears, there never were, but his shoulders heaved involuntarily. She held him through it until he was able to sit up straight again.

She climbed onto the bed, urging him to lie back against the pillows. She sat cross-legged beside him, grabbing his right hand with both of hers, tangling their fingers together on his lap. She looked out the window as she spoke.

“I always say love is for children.” She started.

“You were only 19, but you had been through so much I'm not sure you ever were a child. But that doesn't mean...” he trailed off. Saying “but that doesn't mean you can't love me” sounded too pathetic.

She looked down at him, straight in the eyes. “You might never hear me say this again, but I was wrong.”

“Yeah?” His voice hitched.

He reached up to cup her face in his hands. She leaned into the metal one, pressing her face against it.

“Fuck them for taking away my childhood. Fuck them for making me believe I couldn't have this, that it wasn't safe to have this. You were the best thing, James. You were the best thing.”

He pulled her down so their lips could meet. He tried to be gentle, as if she were precious, but she was precious to him because of her strength. He surged up and flipped her over onto her back.

The thing he loved most about her was that she let him cover his body with hers. She let him cage his arms around her head, because he needed it. He needed to feel like he could protect her even though she didn’t need protecting. He showed her all of his weaknesses and she accepted them in a way no one else could.

She wouldn't betray her vulnerability to anyone else. Even after everyone knew they were together, it was Bucky who curled into Natasha's side or sought affection from her, not the other way around.

She needed it just as much as he did, but she was broken in a thousand tiny places. He was broken in one.

* * * * *

Since they were out in the open anyway, she moved into his rooms in the tower.

“Better view,” she had said.

He thought it was partly to keep an eye on him and partly because she hated sleeping alone. Natalia Alianovna Romanova was a cuddler. She would curl around his back in the middle of the night like a big spoon. She would sprawl over his chest. She never slept without their bodies touching at some point.

“What happened to sleeping better on sofas?” he would tease. She would punch him in the arm and call him some very unflattering things in Russian.

She also spread out a million bottles of lotions and potions and eye shadows in colors Bucky couldn’t name all over his bathroom, and she would notice if he ever moved anything.

Sometimes he could pretend that they were childhood sweethearts rejoined, but it was a passing fancy. One he would never admit to.

He thought about getting a place on his own. He knew Steve was thinking about getting a place in Brooklyn, but then he’d wake up in the middle of the night to both Natalia and Steve holding him down while he tried to fight men in white coats in his dreams. Or he’d wake up thinking his hands were covered in blood and he’d take a scalding hot shower at 3 in the morning until the water would run cold, and Natalia would be there tugging on his hand and handing him a towel.

He tried to kick her out of the bathroom one morning when he woke up with the face in his mind of a little boy he had killed in Bangladesh. He threw up everything in his stomach.

He had been instructed that there should be no witnesses, and he was compelled to obey. He didn’t remember fully, but he was fairly certain he didn’t even hesitate to pull the trigger. People weren’t people when they were targets, and he wasn’t a person when he was killing them. He wondered absently if the taste of bile in his throat would ever really go away.

“Leave me be, Nat,” he said as he rested his forehead on the toilet bowl.

“But-”

“If you knew everything I’ve-”

“And if you knew everything I’ve done. Look, we can’t take it back. There’s no sense in pretending we can.”

“I just wonder when the new memories are going to stop. At some point—at some point there’s a final tally.”

“And if you come work for the agency formerly known as SHIELD, there’s going to be more on that tally.”

He was okay with that. He really was.

“Can you at least let me puke in peace?”

She was sitting in an armchair looking over some files when he emerged from the bathroom. After brushing his teeth and showering, he almost felt alive again.

“You should talk to Rogers,” she said, without looking up.

“Why?” he said as he went up to her and leaned down for a kiss.

“Because he loves you more than he loves baseball and apple pie,” she said with a smirk as he pulled back.

“Steve hates apple pie.”

More words he didn’t know he knew until they had passed his lips.

“That’s exactly why you should talk to him.”

“Maybe for a blow job.”

“Are you trying to negotiate with me right now?”

“Is it working?”

“Go talk to Rogers. I can’t stand his sad puppy face.”

“That wasn’t a no on the blow job.”

She slapped his ass.

“That still wasn't a no,” he said as he wrestled her out of the chair and onto the bed.

She laughed as she started pulling off her clothes.

* * * * *

Later that afternoon, he went to see Bruce instead.

He didn't say anything at first, just watched Bruce doing something on a screen with a 3-D model. He wasn't smart enough to understand any of Bruce' work. His intelligence was found in a specific set of skills—angles, vantage points, coordinating teams, the vulnerable parts on the human body.

Even if he didn’t like killing, there was no way he could do anything else anyway.

But it had been some of the files recovered by HYDRA, and Bruce was looking at a model of a human arm that looked like it was getting eaten by ants.

“What is that?” Bucky blurted out.

“It’s not to scale. I’m trying to figure out how their nanites would replace bone cells. Whatever metal they’re using must interact differently to calcium than Earth metals.”

“Is it like Steve’s shield?”

“Naw, we know how that works. Have you met Logan yet?”

Bucky shook his head.

“Well, he’s our resident consultant on metal skeletons, and even he’s baffled by this.”

Bucky wanted to ask more, but Bruce obviously didn’t care for Logan too much, so he kept his mouth shut. He just made a mental note of the name so he could ask Nat later.

“So what do you think about all this?” he asked vaguely, hoping Bruce would catch his drift.

“You don’t think it’s an intergalactic takeover plot, do you?”

“I don’t know a lot about megalomaniacs set on space domination,” Bucky said drily. “But I think if it were me, I’d build warships instead of, well, metal arms. Humans aren’t really effective weapons on a grand scale.”

His own arm whirred in response.

Humans worked better as assassins.

* * * * *

There was an attack on the tower, not a physical attack, but a cyber one. It was an attempt to hack JARVIS, which was impossible, and whoever it was must have know it was impossible. They must have let themselves be seen just to let the Avengers know their raid of the laboratory didn’t go unnoticed. It was the only explanation.

It wasn’t violent, only confirming to Bucky again that they were dealing with scientific minds. He didn’t agree with Coulson’s assessment that they were after power. Sometimes scientists just did things to see if they could. Sometimes they tinkered around with their own creations and marveled at them even though they were still part human.

An involuntary shiver trembled through him.

“They're after me.” He said it softly, but the room got quiet and everyone's head turned.

He felt uncomfortable with everyone's eyes on him, but he refused to let them see that.

“They thought they were safe because of the wiping,” he shrugged. “Goes to show you shouldn't trust science.”

Tony huffed.

Bruce snorted.

“Do you know something, Buck? If you know something about them that could help, you have to tell us.”

Bucky shrugged. “I know a lot of things.”

He knew who they were, or he had a good guess, but he wasn't ready to part with the memories. This was personal. This was dehumanizing. There had been a group of scientists, he couldn’t remember their names, but their faces had been in Coulson’s files. They seemed to know Pierce but didn’t work with him.

What Bucky remembered most was that they reminded him of Zola. They had been so fascinated with his arm they looked right through him.

Bucky knew now they wanted to test their technology on him. They weren't trying to attack SHIELD to turn them into an army. Pierce might have worked that way, but HYDRA didn’t. Not the HYDRA Bucky knew.

They lurked in the shadows.

They created ghosts.

And now they knew they failed with Bucky.

The thing that made Bucky an asset was his physical skill and his lack of autonomy, but they never could quite control his mind. Brainwashing had a flaw when there was a human will behind it that could feel somewhere deep down that it was being controlled. He was their killer, their myth, and he was good at it. He liked being good at it. He liked their praise, and sometimes he even liked the work.

But he was never really theirs.

And this proved it to him.

He steeled himself and watched every single superhero in the room tense slightly in reaction.

Steve, he trusted with his life, but he wasn't sure he trusted him with information. Steve would run into anything without thinking about it first. Natasha he trusted with information, and sometimes he thought he trusted her with his life.

But he needed to do this himself.

“You’re going to have to use me as bait,” he said.

“No,” Steve said just as Natasha said, “Nyet.”

“Yes. Da,” Bucky said. “Drop me off in Tokyo. Let me take care of Nat's Yakuza guy.”

“How do you know about my Yakuza guy?”

“You talk in your sleep.”

She was clearly about to protest, but Bucky soldiered on.

“I'll lay low for a week. Wait for them to get word that The Winter Soldier is still working, and they'll try to find me. I'm not on any of SHIELD's books. The Yakuza is a private contract. They don’t know what I am to you.”

“If they’re this good, they’ll find you long before a week’s up,” Steve insisted.

Bucky clenched his fists. His arm make a whirring noise at the sudden movement.

“I can still be a ghost.”

He stalked out of the room. He methodically started combing through the tower, getting everything he’d need—weapons that would go undetected, fake identification that he’d had Stark make for him just in case, disposable phones with none of that stupid GPS shit that made espionage more difficult. It was easy to get back in the Winter Soldier mindset. It was like stepping into a familiar pair of worn shoes.

He knew Nat would be waiting for him in their rooms. He thought about leaving without saying a word, just to prove to Steve that he could, but it was different with Nat.

“How’d you really know about my Yakuza guy?” was the first thing she asked.

“I have exceptional hearing and apparently I understand Ryukyuan dialect.”

She laughed.

“You’re something else, Barnes.”

“So I’m Barnes, now?”

“When you’re ready for a fight, you are.”

“Well let me be James for a minute?” he asked, lowering his eyes and stepping closer to her.

She nodded before throwing her arms around his neck.

“I don’t have to tell you to be careful, do I?”

“No,” he said as he buried his nose in her hair and inhaled. “But I’m glad you did.”

* * * * *

The plan went off without a hitch until it didn't.

Bucky had been in Tokyo before, but not for a job. He had been taken out just to be Pierce's show pony.

He didn’t have any trouble hiding in Tokyo. He could literally live in rafters for days at a time, so checking into a hotel under an assumed name and then breaking into an empty room in the hotel across the street was nothing. It took them two days before they even found that room. He followed them to their hideout which was conveniently near a Buddhist temple. Bucky had spent more time than he cared to admit hiding in holy places.

There was no hope for his soul anymore, if he had one, but for the first time, he felt a twinge of guilt that his presence was a desecration. He tracked down the Yakuza target, feeling the gaze of an audience as he did so. But it was easy to lose his trackers. For all their scientific foresight, they weren’t particularly good at stealth.

On day six, he took care of Nat’s target. He had a good window, and he had to take it. It wasn't exactly easy to kill the Yakuza—they were almost always surrounded by goons. He knew the HYDRA team was nearby. They had brought out most of the henchmen he had spotted over the previous five days. They let him get the kill without interfering. He knew they wouldn’t let him get ten feet from the body without swooping in.

He pretended to fight back, which was harder than it looked. He could have easily taken the whole team out.

What he hadn’t counted on was having a panic attack when they tried to inject him with a sedative, which resulted in two more kills than he intended. That pissed them off. That pissed them off a lot.

When Bucky woke up he was strapped down. When he tried to scream he realized there was a gag in his mouth.

It was agonizing. Whatever they were injecting him with hurt as much as having needles in his brain, if not worse. He could feel his body rejecting the nanites. He could feel them moving in his body the way he could feel blood pumping in his veins. Had he been a normal human body, he was almost certain he would have been dead already. He could feel the heat coming off his metal arm as it started to sizzle in a different chemical reaction. He couldn’t turn his head, but he felt the presence of someone beside him, probably studying the arm.

“Interesting,” a voice whispered.

Then Bucky felt something giving him a sharp poke where his metal arm was fused with his flesh.

He did the only thing he could. He blacked out.

* * * * *

Steve found him. When Bucky came to, Steve was there gaping at him. By the horrified look on his face, he knew that whatever they had done, it was bad.

“Stark’s going to have to fix my arm after all,” Bucky managed to choke out.

“Buck-” Steve whispered. “I’m-”

“We knew they’d do something like this. At least, I did. Who better to test your technology on than someone you’ve already ‘enhanced’. It turns out the stuff doesn’t work on me. The metal wouldn’t fuse with my bones. In a way, Zola saved me.”

He started laughing. It was shock. He knew it was shock. There was a man in Morocco who had started laughing as soon as Bucky stepped into his room. Hysterical laughter as The Winter Soldier stalked toward him twirling a knife.

It was an unfamiliar feeling to be on the receiving end, though.

Steve looked like he wanted to give Bucky a hug, but then Natalia burst into the room and barreled past Steve and into Bucky’s space. She slapped him across the face hard.

“Nat-”

“You’d better be okay.”

“I’m-” she didn’t let him finish.

“Never being bait again.” Only then did she acknowledge Steve. “Coast is clear, Rogers. Thor got the injecting device and serum locked up. No more traces of the nanites.”

“Except the ones in me,” Bucky threw in.

Two sets of icy eyes glared at him.

* * * * *

There was a flurry of activity afterward—Bruce poking at his arm, Stark poking at his arm, Coulson asking him to write a report, Bucky telling Coulson where to shove his report, Natalia yelling at him, though ultimately forgiving him.

He knew he needed to talk to Steve. The look on Steve’s face when he saw that Bucky had been strapped down and tested on—again—and, well, he looked worse than Bucky felt.

Bucky finally found Steve on the roof of the tower. He looked out of place, standing at attention with his hands clasped behind his back, like a soldier.

Then Bucky realized he was looking out over Brooklyn.

He knew Steve knew he was there, but he didn’t make a move to speak or look at Bucky. So Bucky came up to stand next to him, standing the same way.

“It was still me,” Bucky finally said. “It was always me.”

“Bucky-”

“They stopped sending me to America in the '70s.”

“What?” Steve looked genuinely surprised as he turned to look at Bucky finally.

“I wouldn’t go to rendezvous points when I was supposed to. I didn’t—they redirected my neural pathways—like Banner said. But my brain fought against it.”

He saw Steve’s confusion, so he kept going. He hadn't told anyone else about his trips to America, not even Natalia. She wouldn't have understood.

“So I didn’t have personal memories. Or a strong sense of self. But they had to keep my language memory, my muscle memory, my training—and my body remembered Brooklyn. I remembered that Polish bakery near the park we used to go to, the one with the really good pączki. Hell, I remembered exactly how long it took to walk from the Battery to Grand Central Station.”

“Bucky that’s-”

Buck shook his head. If he didn't get it out now, he was never going to. Steve was starting to look at him with wide, hopeful eyes, and it was just too much. But Bucky kept on.

“I knew I knew you. On the bridge in D.C. I knew. But the memory just wasn’t there for me to grab.” He closed his eyes. “And you refused to give up on me. Even though I’m not the same man.”

“He was always still inside you.”

Now that was something Bucky agreed with, but he knew Steve thought it was a good thing. He nodded slowly. “I was still me when I made my kills. It was the control I didn't like, not what they were making me do. I think I wanted to believe that my targets were bad people, and maybe sometimes they were. I haven't had the balls to look them all up yet. But whoever they were, I have to live with that.”

Steve reached out his arm and clamped his hand on Bucky's shoulder, and then Steve said something Bucky never expected to hear come out of his mouth.

“People are just people, Buck. They aren't really good or bad.”

* * * * *

Bucky was back in Bruce's laboratory two days after he got back. Stark had re-calibrated his arm and Banner wanted to see the effect it had on Bucky’s brain.

When the scan was done, Bucky lingered.

“Natasha—Natalia—she said you were looking at places in Brooklyn,” Bruce said far too casually.

“Yeah, I don't know. I like it here, but sometimes everything is just a reminder of how messed up Nat and I are. But I guess we wouldn't be any less messed up in a brownstone.”

“Do you love her?” Bruce asked.

Bucky took a deep breath.

“I might have put a bullet in my brain to quiet the ghosts if not for Natalia. I would have fallen apart,” Bucky said quietly.

She stepped into the doorway exactly 30 seconds later. She had heard. And had counted until a reasonable amount of time had passed.

She walked straight toward him, ignoring Bruce entirely, stepping into his space so closely he had to hold onto her in order to keep his balance. She wrapped her arms around his waist and curled her head to tuck it under his chin.

His heart was pounding hard in his chest as he held her tighter, to assure himself that she was real, solid, and not going anywhere.

He didn’t know how long they stood like that, but when he looked up, Bruce was gone, having quietly slipped out of the lab to give them privacy.

“When I found out I was working for the wrong side, it hurt. It hurt because I had put my trust in something, and it turned out my gut instinct was wrong,” she said. “But then I realized something—they’re all wrong sides.”

“So why do you keep doing it? Is it loyalty? The Avengers pay well? What?”

“Sometimes I think—it's silly.”

“Tell me,” he murmured against her hair.

She pulled back a little so she could look him in the eye.

“I believe that there’s something good in the universe. I feel it when I’m with you, and it’s real. I never felt that before, even when I thought I was right. And I think maybe I can finally do something good in return. Sometimes I think I can be good.”

“You’ve done me good, Nat. You've been so good for me.”

She started to shake her head, but he brought his hand up to hold her chin in place.

“No, that's not—James, you're so strong. You don't know how strong you are. You fought against Zola and Pierce and the brainwashing. You always knew in your gut that there was something to fight against.”

“No.” Bucky shook his head. “No that's not-”

“Hush,” she said against his lips.

It was easier to kiss her than to argue.

Sometimes he wished he could just keep kissing her.

Anyway, he had no plans on stopping any time soon.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [tumblr](http://tuesdaymidnight.tumblr.com) or [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/tuesdaymidnight) so we can cry about Sebastian Stan together.


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